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To: narby
The standard story runs something like this (if we might be afforded the literary luxury of slight caricature): In his famous Origin of Species, Darwin presented a purely scientific theory applicable only to the realm of biology, a theory that was immediately accepted by all men of good will and functioning intellect. Unhappily, a little before World War II, intellectually low-caliber types in Germany—different intellectually low-caliber types than those who rejected Darwinism—hijacked Darwin’s pure science for their own morally malformed projects. As opposed to Darwin himself, these Nazi thugs applied the notion of survival of the fittest to human beings, and thereby illicitly co-opted Darwinism to serve their malicious eugenic urges.

In 1871, after others had publicly drawn out the implications of evolutionary theory for human beings, Darwin published his Descent of Man. If we just read the Origin we can believe the standard story. If we read the Descent, it is all too clear that Darwin reconceived ethics on the basis of survival of the fittest, and that the unfit individuals and races were evolutionary dross and should be left behind for the good and purity of the human species. The Descent is full of the most startling eugenic and racist quotes, softened at times by Darwin’s illogical appeal to sympathy. ...From the first appearance in German of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the intellectual elite understood quite clearly the eugenic and racial implications. ...Darwinism as applied to the moral sphere was a movement not of brown-shirt thugs, but of the intellectual upper class—the top medical doctors, chemists, economists, botanists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, ethnologists, jurists, and even geographers in Germany’s best universities. The call for eugenic elimination of the unfit and for war as a means of evolutionary purification did not ring from the beer halls but from the halls of academe.

And so, against the standard story, in which ignorant Nazi eugenicists and racists had illicitly borrowed from Darwin,...“Nazi barbarism was motivated by an ethic that prided itself on being scientific.” Given the acceptance of evolution as an established fact in biology, the German intelligentsia drew the logical consequences: a new ethic, with a new definition of good and evil.

The evolutionary process became the arbiter of all morality. Whatever promoted the evolutionary progress of humanity was deemed good, and whatever hindered biological improvement was considered morally bad. Multitudes must perish in this Malthusian struggle anyway, they reasoned, so why not improve humanity by speeding up the destruction of the disabled and the inferior races? According to this logic, the extermination of individuals and races deemed inferior and “unfit” was not only morally justified, but indeed, morally praiseworthy. Thus Hitler—and many other Germans—perpetuated one of the most evil programs the world has every witnessed under the delusion that Darwinism could help us discover how to make the world better. - LINK

18 posted on 09/29/2005 3:03:35 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe (Millions for defense but not one penny for tribute!)
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To: Tailgunner Joe

just gonna watch


19 posted on 09/29/2005 3:07:29 PM PDT by dynoman (Objectivity is the essence of intelligence. - Marylin vos Savant)
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To: Tailgunner Joe

From your own link:

"It is not that “Darwinism of logical necessity leads…to Nazism,” so that (absurdly) every Darwinist is logically a Nazi. Rather, Darwinism provides a new understanding of human nature, and hence a new view of “human life and death,” that made Darwinism “a necessary, but not a sufficient, cause” of Nazism."


21 posted on 09/29/2005 3:15:21 PM PDT by wyattearp (The best weapon to have in a gunfight is a shotgun - preferably from ambush.)
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To: Tailgunner Joe
Hitler didn't kill Jews because he believed in Evolution.

If he believed in Evolution through natural selection and he thought Jews were inferior then things would sort themselves out just fine.

Hitler told the German people that they needed to kill the Jews because the Jews killed Christ.

In a speech delivered April 12, 1922, published in "My New Order," and quoted in Freethought Today (April 1990), Hitler said:

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.

In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison.

Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.

As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice . . .

And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery.

When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exploited.""

Hitler on signing the Nazi-Vatican Concordat, April 26, 1933: "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without religious foundation is built on air; consequently all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . ."

In a speech at Koblenz, August 26, 1934, Hitler said: "National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity . . . For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life . . . These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles!"

October 24, 1933, in a speech in Berlin, Hitler said: "We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
24 posted on 09/29/2005 3:18:43 PM PDT by Mylo ( scientific discovery is also an occasion of worship.)
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To: Tailgunner Joe

Darwin was not so innocent of eugenics. His associates (and I believe a brother or cousin) were intimately involved with the budding eugenics movement in England. He knew what they were doing and approved of it.


53 posted on 09/29/2005 4:31:24 PM PDT by Ghost of Philip Marlowe (Liberals are blind. They are the dupes of Leftists who know exactly what they're doing.)
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